This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against standard accounts of interdisciplinary 'integration,' and rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. Rethinking Interdisciplinarity does not merely advocate int…
Most optimistic accounts of analogies in archaeology focus on cases where analogies lead to accurate or well-supported interpretations of the past. This chapter offers a complementary argument: analogies can also provide a valuable form of understanding of cultural and social phenomena when they fail, in the sense of either being shown inaccurate or the evidence being insufficient to determ…
The Hispanic and Anglo worlds are often portrayed as the Cain and Abel of Western culture, antagonistic and alien to each other. This book challenges such view with a new critical conceptual framework – the ‘Hispanic-Anglosphere’ – to open a window into the often surprising interactions of individuals, transnational networks and global communities that, it argues, made of the British Is…
Memory matters. It matters because memory brings the past into the present, and opens it up to the future. But it also matters literally, because memory is mediated materially. Materiality is the stuff of memory. Meaningful objects that we love (or hate) function not only as aide-mémoire but are integral to memory. Drawing on previous scholarship on the interrelation of memory and materiality,…
Since Roy Porter’s pioneering work on the ‘patient’s view’, historians have taken up the challenge to rewrite medicine’s past ‘from below’. However, this chapter argues that they have not been radical enough and have neglected a key part of Porter’s agenda for the new social history of medicine. He wrote: ‘We should stop seeing the doctor as the agent of primary care. People t…
The Hispanic and Anglo worlds are often portrayed as the Cain and Abel of Western culture, antagonistic and alien to each other. This book challenges such view with a new critical conceptual framework – the ‘Hispanic-Anglosphere’ – to open a window into the often surprising interactions of individuals, transnational networks and global communities that, it argues, made of the British Is…
The chapter traces Gimbutas’ engagement with gender as a research topic, proposing that her work on European prehistory should be seen as written from a feminist point of view. It explains her contributions to rewriting prehistory from a women-centered perspective, her reinterpretations of female symbolism in early figurative art, and her implicit critique of the androcentric narratives of th…
"The relational complexity of urban and rural landscapes in space and in time. The development of historical geographical information systems (HGIS) and other methods from the digital humanities have revolutionised historical research on cultural landscapes. Additionally, the opening up of increasingly diverse collections of source material, often incomplete and difficult to interpret, has led …
Archaeology, genetics and historical linguistics all differ radically in both their data sources and analytical methods. In principle that should only make the various disciplines all the more complementary, but in practice the sub plots seem to contradict one another as often as they concur